The historian Allen Guelzo has observed that the Episcopal Church has been
“served by self-protective biography.” In Brahmin Prophet,
Gillis Harp shows how true that is in regard to Phillips Brooks. Previous biographers
of the dominant figure of the late-nineteenth-century Episcopal Church—A. V. G.
Allen, William Laurence, Raymond Albright, and E. Clowes Chorley—largely
ignored the romantic influence on and the denigration of doctrine in Brooks’s
theology.

Harp’s significant contribution is not to detail again the biographical
incidences in Brooks’s life, fully done by Allen, but to give us for the
first time a thorough and masterly description and analysis of Brooks’s
theology. The subtitle, “The Path of Liberal Protestantism,” of
this diligent (784 unobtrusive and helpful footnotes) work indicates something
of its profound importance. Harp, a professor of history at Grove City College,
shows that Brooks was an example, agent, and symptom of Liberal Protestantism’s
loss of its confessional roots and doctrinal structure, and subsequently of
its influence in American culture.

Leaders of the Broad Church movement—the name used then for what we
now call Liberal Protestantism—generally abhorred any identification with
church “party,” but by the end of the century their party had become
the dominating one in the Episcopal Church, a position it maintains over a century
later. The once powerful Evangelical party was moribund and virtually gone.
The Anglo-Catholics could only muster fifteen Episcopal votes against Brooks’s
consecration as bishop of Massachusetts, and their objection was not so much
to his theology and doctrine as to his polity, particularly his denigration
of the Apostolic Succession they claimed for Anglicanism. Brooks made no secret
of denigrating the idea, along with that of papal infallibility.

What were the doctrinal issues that brought Brooks away from his mother’s
staunch Evangelical Anglicanism? Harp shows that he departed from it even while
at Virginia Seminary, in correction to the claims of other biographers that
he faithfully absorbed the distinctive confessional affirmation of Evangelical
theology he found there. The influence of his days as an undergraduate at Harvard
and his distinctive inclination to feeling rather than reason made him theologically
uncomfortable at Virginia from the very beginning.

“What emerged was a Romanticized and moralistic form of Christian belief
that was underwritten by an exceedingly pragmatic view of dogma,” Harp
writes. He shows how the romantic climate of the Gilded Age influenced Brooks’s
negative attitude toward doctrine and dogma and led him to a confidence in “the
divinity of humanity” and in man’s historical progress. Previous
treatments of Brooks have failed to observe the serious consequences of his
claim of “an uncreated humanity” in the Trinity, which Harp clearly
exposes.

However much Brooks was influenced by his age, he was clear that “we
ought to make, not be made by the spirit of the times,” yet his belief
in the divine image of human nature gave him the confidence that this could
be done. He was equally contemptuous of appeals to inherited authority, whether
the Roman Catholic magisterium, Anglo-Catholic apostolic authority, or the traditional
Protestant reliance on Scripture as “God’s word written.”
There was no place in his theology for the Reformation confessions or the magisterial
doctrine of justification by grace through faith.

What then was the final authority for Brooks? “In conscience, not authority
must be the final warrant of all Christian truth,” he declared. Without
an infallible church or an inerrant Bible, he asked, “Then what remains?
I answer Individualism. Let us not fear that name of which some people have
such terror.” Harp shows how this confidence in individual conscience
“is linked to Brooks’ deep faith in human progress and in basic
human goodness.”

Phillips Brooks was truly a magnificently talented man, an incomparably effective
preacher, and an unrivaled icon of Episcopal ministry of his day. It is ironic
to contrast his incomparable popularity in England and America with the present
theologically and spiritually anemic (though politically still dominant) Liberal
Protestant movement in the Episcopal Church.

In a time characterized by a lack of appreciation of doctrine, dogma, and confessions,
Brooks and his influence flourished. But such an optimistic religion could not
continue to flourish. The accelerating negativity of the skeptical approach
to Scripture, the realization of the pathological capacities of conscience,
and the loss of the inflexible moral commitments that he favored over right
belief, left the Liberal Protestant tradition that Phillips Brooks symbolizes
bereft of any prophylaxis against the tide of secular times.

Seldom has any work on one man carried such widespread, and currently needed,
understanding of history. Phillips Brooks was indeed example, agent, and symbol
of the path Liberal Protestantism was to take. Brahmin Prophet is truly
a prophetic book.

C. FitzSimons Allison is the retired Episcopal bishop of South Carolina and the author of The Cruelty of Heresy (Morehouse) and other books. He is one of the founders of the modern Evangelical movement in the Episcopal Church.

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